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RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review
Jonathan Avidan writes "The RSS 3 Homepage now offers its first publicly available specification, the RSS 3 Lite-type Specification First Draft, intended for review and commenting for revision. RSS 3 is a reworking of RSS 2.0, filling the gaps and removing unnecessary features and is fully backwards-compatible, rather than a new format."
How does one remove features and still remain backwards compatible?
Damn, and I *just* got around to implementing RSS1 in my CMS ... ah well. :)
... plans are afoot for Microsoft to co-opt RSS and rename it "web feeds"[from El Reg, so take it with a pinch of snuff]. Now, that is a better name, but it wouldn't be the first time that some incompatible variations got added to an open standard during this process (*cough* Kerberos).
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
And already Microsoft is planning to pollute it.
They removed
:)
<clouds>
<skipHours>
<skipDays>
<textInput>
<source> element
<pics> element
<guid> element's optional "isPemraLink" attribute
And added
The <comments> element's optional "type" attribute
The <pubDate> element's optional "type" attribute
The <ttl> element's optional "span" attribute
Looks like good news for bloggers and God knows what for stuff like GeoRSS or BlogTorrents
I've been waiting for that a long time now
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Why isn't gzip compression of RSS feeds part of the specification? I'd have thought it'd be a natural thing to include for a format designed for minimizing bandwidth usage.
blech, versioning quagmire in feed formats. who needs the hassle? just use Atom 1.0 from IETF, no less.
Also worth mentioning is that the Atom syndication standard, currently in development, is out of this standard's scope and does not concern it. Due to contradiction in structure, the standards cannot rely on one another, yet an implementing client should support both standards.
How about all five RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, RSS 3.0 and of course ATOM. This will be really a joy for implementers.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
that this happens on the day after the IETF announces that it's approved the ATOM syndication format?
o mpub-format-11.txt
Announcement reproduced below:
The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'The Atom Syndication Format' as a Proposed Standard
This document is the product of the Atom Publishing Format and Protocol Working Group.
The IESG contact persons are Scott Hollenbeck and Ted Hardie.
A URL of this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-at
Technical Summary:
This document describes the Atom format for syndication. It is XML-based and is considered to be the successor to the earlier RSS formats. Its primary use is for web-based content, but is expected to be used for non-web content as well, such as personal news feeds.
Working Group Summary:
Some members of the working group remain unenthusiastic about some sections of the document, but the chairs strongly believe that there is rough (or better) consensus in support of the document as a whole.
For some of the parts with the most contention, there cannot be more than very rough consensus due to basic differences in the way people would design parts of the format, particularly given that we have many models in existence with the different flavors of RSS. For some parts of the document, there is contention about whether or not a particular item should or should not be in the Atom core versus being an extension. For some parts, there is contention whether there should be MUST/SHOULD/MAY leeway for content creators in the presence or absence of an element, or the semantic content of an element; the
group really pushed RFC 2119 around during the past few months.
Protocol Quality
Scott Hollenbeck and the XML Directorate have reviewed the specification for the IESG. Test implementations have confirmed basic protocol soundness.
RSS 2 was the one whose development "contradicts all other standards", not RSS 1.0 as you would claim.
Between that and Dave Winer's sheer craziness (and the craziness of those like you who drank too much of Dave's cool-aid), the future lies in the open standard called Atom, not in RSS 2 or RSS 3.
Heck, at this point even RSS 1.0 has a far better chance of success than RSS 2, with more and more people picking it as a base for extensible microformats after realizing that RSS 1.0 got a lot of things right years before most people even realized why they were needed.
Why on earth would we need another (fourth) RSS version?
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Since a lot of search engines are starting to provide results in RSS, why not a "Next", "Back" option? It seems rather useless to be able to get only five results in my favorite aggregator, and I would love to be able to go "forward" within a certain result set. This might also work for sites that provide news stories as well, such as Slashdot, in terms of getting older articles from the past week or two.
I get the feeling that this is a practical joke/troll by Jonathan Avidan - the person who is editing this new specification, the person who maintains the website linked to, and who submitted this article to Slashdot.
Yeah, the RSS 2 specification could do with cleaning up and clarification. No, it's not feasible because of too many people doing stupid things like announcing new versions of RSS all on their own and fragmenting the community.
From the FAQ:
Follow the link. It's a new message board with no posts.
There is zero community behind this "standard", it's just a spec some guy decided to write of his own accord. In contrast, a real community effort, Atom, has just reached 1.0 and is standardized by the IETF. Nobody should take this "RSS 3.0" seriously.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
But it already exists!. Has for almost three years!
With Atom all official and whatnot, why would anyone be working on RSS 3.0?
Atom seems far superior to RSS 2.0 and much farther along than RSS 3.0.
Is someone trying to give Dave Winer a heart attack?
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Can't see the use of RSS3 when pretty common elements are stripped out.. couldn't find the enclosure element, which is kinda vital for podcasters. Not to mention other elements that have gone MIA. Lite and full?, whats next RSS diet tips?, c'mon, we got enough flavours of the day..
"If it's true that our species is alone in the universe, then I'd have to say that the universe aimed rather low
Don't forget that, while RSS is technically an XML-based format, many applications do their best to parse broken RSS. Thus, every application must now do its best to parse broken RSS. It's the same problem with web browsers and broken HTML.
Frankly, you simply shouldn't be trying to implement RSS yourself these days unless you have a very good reason for doing so. Just pick up one of the available libraries that can already parse broken feeds.
Five? There are nine different versions of RSS. Not counting this new RSS 3.0, or the previous RSS 3.0 that has been around for years.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
This RSS3 spec is starting to be no longer really simple. Are they going to drop the 'R'? If so I think I might have to side with Microsoft and Google and opt for a name change.
I'll swear in court if necessary (though if necessary, then we've gone too far, haven't we?) that I had no idea the IETF approved Atom until reading the comments here. It was published today because it got finished today, simple as that.
Yrs John XXX
This page then maybe needs a fix.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
The site says that Atom is "similar in purpose", so amounts to this: they're trying to do the same thing as Atom, but in a way that will make the current situation even more confusing (and that will probably drive Dave Winer crazy)
What's with all of the "This section is normative", "That section is non-normative", "This section is informative" crap in the document?
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Now he will have to come up with RSS 4.0...
Looked at the spec. quickly. Did not see any support for authentication. It would be useful to be able to provide a subscription service to selected users with some degree of security. Did I miss this in the spec. (or previous versions)? I admit I'm somewhat new to RSS.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Wow you have put a lot of effort into this, but have you talked with anyone in the community? Why not participate in Atom discussions, why go off an implement yet another flavour of RSS. I call "practical joke" or lame attempt at getting "internet famous".
Something Witty Goes Here
I don't get it, why is this necessary?
When I said 'You should follow the Lama', I meant the Buddha not the camel-related South American animal.
So I basically have to link this from here, maybe people will learn eventually.
7
This whole mess is just not funny anymore.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/10/122820/9
How about thirteen different versions of RSS?
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
Will the refresh banning behavior still apply?
Yes, definitely to be taken with a pinch of snuff. Or at least with an eye for interesting typos :)
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
My reply is informative
Thanks, that makes sense, I suppose. It is pedantic, but that's how standards are supposed to be I suppose.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I am still a little concerned that RSS does not become too 'feature rich', there is a reason it is called RSS.
Doesn't it stand for Rich Site Summary?
Spec Releashed, Slashdot Commenters Gone Wild
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
I'm not sure what to make of RSS 3.0. Is it a blessed successor of Dave Winer's RSS 2.0, or is it a successor of the RDF-based RSS 1.0? Maybe it's yet a third RSS spec from someone unrelated to Winer or the RSS 1.0 people. Ugh. These syndication specs all do essentially the same damned thing, so it's just petty bickering over who's spec is whose and who gets to use the nomenclature "RSS".
When I chose to implement syndication I went with Atom because of the bickering over RSS. Atom is far from perfect, but it's functionally equivalent to the RSS variants. And is there any aggregator in use that doesn't handle all of these syndication specs?
...they can finally tell us what RSS really stands for.
Tomorrow some other guy may come up with RSS 4.0 specs...
To summarize things here: RSS 3 is only "official" to the one guy that modified the RSS 2 standard (which he doesn't control), itself not related to RSS 0.91 and 1.0, neither of which are controlled by the same people. Atom is the only thing remotely like a standard, and everybody hates it because of that. Aggregator authors don't give a flying fuck about any of them because they're doomed to support broken non-compliant implementations of all of them anyway.
Basically, it's all a bunch of pointless dick-waving.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
I have to wait 16 seconds now :(
Doubtful. Creating new versions of RSS has been all the rage for years now. As entertaining as Dave Winer's antics may be though, giving him heart attacks went out of style a long time ago.
My, my, RSS is really balkanizing right in front of my eyes. Especially since there's now two formats called RSS 3; one is not serious though, the other pretends not to, both are a great big comedic circus.
How long, oh Lord Berners-Lee, you let our children wait? When shall your Consortium and your TaskForce drop us the blessed Atom 1.0? Already allow the Drafts to turn into Standards! Soon! Oh so very soon!
That's a timeline, not a list of versions. Mark's post, "The Myth of RSS Compatibility", is a more accurate list of the discrepancies between various RSS implementations.
Odds of being killed by lightning and winning the lottery in the same day: 1 in 2^55
Podcast blogospherirati! This development will undoubtly help podcasts take over radio.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Is it a spec for a document, or a software application? All this talk of "posting new content into the feed"..
p i-quick-guide.php
http://www.atomenabled.org/developers/tutorials/a
Someone needs to write a simple RSS->Atom migration guide, leaving out all the content-management crappola.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Its killer app? HTML is a document format! It is HTTP which is *the* 'killer app' behind the web, not HTML.
And lokeee---it's all simple name-colon-content-linefeed-goodness! Just like SMTP, which could be argued is an even bigger killer app for the Internet.
The problem is that people confuse concepts and don't think all the way through. Somehow XML is "extensible" when SMTP is the king of extensibility. HTML is a *great* document format and text markup language, no question about that!
HTML could even be described as a killer app in its own---but that does not mean protocols and config files should suddenly borrow its syntax. Even W3C knows that. Look at the CSS standard, which is the best thing that happened to HTML since the 'TABLE'-tag.
CSS is a pure W3C standard, and not an angle bracket in sight. And no one on the barricades proposing to re-architecture CSS with XML-tags. Why? Because it is well designed from top to bottom. And the right tool for the right job.
So, if RSS 2.0 is really more like RSS 0.95 and was just called 2.0 because of warring RSS factions, will RSS 3.0 be more like RSS 0.96 or will it finally catch up with 1.0 and be more like a 1.1?
RSS 3.0 Cease & Desist Notice
The style of the notice and a healthy attitude well deserve some time spent reading it.
PS Agree about RSS 1.0.
Gee, if only there were a way to transform various XML documents into a common XML specification so we only have to build one import processor...
*cough*XSLT*cough*
As (one version of) its name implies ("Really Simple Syndication"), RSS is an excellent way to get your content out to the feed consuming public (people or systems). However, since it is so generic, it has its limitations. When you see an RSS feed, how do you know what it is? Did it come from a blog, a bulletin board, a news site, your aunt's recipe site, a bookmarks list or a set of recently updated photos? Apart from an analysis of the "generator" string, the proposed RSS 3.0 doesn't easily solve this existing problem. How is content related to other content? Have there been any replies or comments on this content? Is item 1 a reply to item 2?
For my part, I'm interested in content that comes from online community discussions: blogs, mailing lists, bulletin boards, newsgroups - something where one person makes a post on a 'forum' and someone replies to that post.
Researchers in our Semantic Web cluster at DERI, NUI Galway have been working on an open specification for describing communities using online discussion forums, leading to what Ryan King and others term "distributed conversations".
The result is SIOC, standing for Semantically-Interconnected Online Communities .
The initial version of our SIOC specification has been drafted. It can be used in on its own (having a complete set of terms) or in conjunction with other RDF formats such as RSS 1.0 (and 1.1).
At the moment, online communities are islands that are not interlinked, and the SIOC ontology has been proposed to not only link these communities but to leverage data in ways that were previously unknown.
While there are many (useful) classes and properties in SIOC, it can essentially be boiled down to: Users create Posts that are contained in Forums that are hosted on Sites, e.g.
Posts have reply Posts, and Forums can be parents of other Forums.
In terms of producing metadata, we've started with SIOC exporters for open-source discussion systems such as WordPress and Drupal / CivicSpace, and more are on the way. We'd also love to get input from creators of other community discussion systems. Thanks.